The Little Friend

Eugene made an indistinct noise. Curtis suffered from numerous illnesses, some of them serious, and this was the last thing he wanted to think about right now. He realized that what he actually needed to do was to ask somebody if he could see Farish’s body, spend a few minutes alone with it, say a little prayer. Farish had never seemed too concerned with his destiny after death (or his destiny on earth, for that matter) but that didn’t mean he hadn’t received grace at the last. After all: God had smiled unexpectedly on Farish before. When he’d shot himself in the head, after the bulldozer incident, and the doctors all said the machines were the only thing keeping him alive, he’d surprised them all by rising up like Lazarus. How many men had woken almost literally from the dead, sitting up suddenly amidst the life-support machines, asking for mashed potatoes? Would God pluck a soul so dramatically from the grave, just to cast it down to damnation? If he could see the body—look upon it with his own eyes—he felt he would know the state in which Farish had passed away.

“I want to see my brother, before they take him away,” he said. “I’m going to find the doctor.”

The cop nodded. Eugene turned to walk away, but Curtis—in a sudden panic—clutched his wrist.

“You can leave him out here with me, if you want,” said the cop. “I’ll look after him.”

“No,” said Eugene, “no, that’s fine, he can come, too.”

The cop looked at Curtis; he shook his head. “When something like this happens, it’s a blessing for them,” he said. “Not understanding, I mean.”

“Don’t none of us understand it,” said Eugene.

————

The medicine they gave Harriet made her sleepy. Presently, there was a knock outside her door: Tatty. “Darling!” she cried, swooping in. “How’s my child?”

Harriet—elated—struggled up in bed and held out her arms. Then, suddenly, it seemed to her that she was dreaming, and that the room was empty. The strangeness so overwhelmed her that she rubbed her eyes and tried to hide her confusion.

But it was Tatty. She kissed Harriet on the cheek. “But she looks well, Edith,” she was crying. “She looks alert.”

“Well, she’s much improved,” said Edie crisply. She set a book on Harriet’s bed table. “Here, I thought you might like this to keep you company.”

Harriet lay back on the pillow and listened to the two of them talking, their familiar voices mingling in a radiant and harmonious nonsense. Then she was somewhere else, in a dark blue gallery with shrouded furniture. Rain fell and fell.

“Tatty?” she said, sitting up in the bright room. It was later in the day. The sunlight on the opposite wall had stretched, and shifted, and slunk down the wall until it spilled in a glazed pool upon the floor.

They were gone. She felt dazed, as if she’d walked from a dark movie matinee out into the startling afternoon. A fat, familiar-looking blue book sat on her bed table: Captain Scott. At the sight of it, her heart lifted; just to make sure she wasn’t seeing things, she reached out and put her hand on it, and then—despite her headache and her grogginess—she laboriously sat up in bed and tried to read for a while. But as she read, the silence of the hospital room sank gradually into a glacial and otherworldly stillness, and soon she got the unpleasant sense that the book was speaking to her—Harriet—in a direct and most disturbing way. Every few lines, a phrase would stand out quite sharply and with pointed meaning, as if Captain Scott were addressing her directly, as if he had deliberately encoded a series of personal messages to her in his journals from the Pole. Every few lines, some new significance struck her. She tried to argue herself out of it, but it was no use, and soon she grew so afraid that she was forced to put the book aside.

Dr. Breedlove walked past her open door, and stopped short to see her sitting upright in bed, looking fearful and agitated.

“Why are you awake?” he demanded. He came in and examined the chart, his jowly face expressionless, and clomped off. Within five minutes, a nurse hurried into the room with yet another hypodermic needle.

“Well, go on, roll over,” she said crossly. She seemed angry at Harriet for some reason.

After she left, Harriet kept her face pressed into the pillow. The blankets were soft. Noises stretched out and ran smoothly over her head. Then down she spun quickly, into wide heartsick emptiness, the old weightlessness of first nightmares.

————

“But I didn’t want tea,” said a fretful, familiar voice.

The room was now dark. There were two people in it. A weak light burned in a corona behind their heads. Then, to her dismay, Harriet heard a voice she hadn’t heard in a long time: her father’s.

“Tea’s all they had.” He spoke with an exaggerated politeness that verged on sarcasm. “Except coffee and juice.”

“I told you not to go all the way down to the cafeteria. There’s a Coke machine in the hall.”

“Don’t drink it if you don’t want it.”